Dancing Robots Save Japan

Katsushi Ikeuchi and
other researchers at Tokyo University have turned to humanoid robots to
find a way to preserve Japanese cultural
heritage. The number of humans that know and practice Japanese
traditional dancing is declining rapidly and many Japanese have seen it
only at local festivals. Using Kawada's HRP-2 Promet
humanoid, a $484,000 robot, Ikeuchi has painstakingly found ways to
reproduce the physical moves of Japanese dance in a robot. The movements
of live dancers were recorded in much the same way used in Hollywood for
special effects. For more details on the problems involved in creating
realistic dancing motion in humanoid robots, there are a number of research
papers on the topic. For photos and video of HRP-2 Promet operating
backhoes and doing other non-dance things, see the plyojump.com website.

These sorts of robot are still too expensive, and rely upon heavy duty
computing power. Even if they are able to carry out some useful tasks
the cost of using a robot like this is still far higher than the
equivalent cost of employing a human.

I think something more like a big version of Robosapien V2 would be more
practical and affordable, especially if it could be wirelessly teleoperated.

Its very impressive but still needs a little bit of work. Looking at
that video though, I'm sure it wont be long until complex tasks like
that will be performed by humanoid robots. Like motters said, they are
expensive and I can visualise something like oversized lower cost
robots like robosapiens doing EOD work or something like that.